Papers, books, talks etc

This page will keep on getting organized, and re-organized

• 1948 - A Mathematical Theory of Communication - Claude Shannon
  • The bedrock of digital. Very readable.
  • Wikipedia
  • pdf

Meta

• Report - 2025 - A Deep Peek into DeepSeek AI’s Talent and Implications for US Innovation

General

• ⭐ Talk - 2012 - Inventing on Principle - Bret Victor
• ⭐ Interview - 2018 - Money as an Instrument of Change - Chamath Palihapitiya, Founder and CEO Social Capital
• ⭐ Essay - 1989 - Worse is better

Software engineering

• Paper - 1985 - Programming as theory building - Peter Naur

• Paper - 1986 - No Silver Bullet —Essence and Accident in Software Engineering - Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

• General

  • ⭐ Talk - 2011 - Simple made easy - Rich Hickey
  • ⭐ Talk - 2013 - Hammock Driven Development - Rich Hickey
  • ⭐ Talk - 2016 - The Silver Bullet Syndrome by Hadi Hariri
  • Video - 2020 - Developing Open Source Software is a Political Act

Architecture design

• Talk - 2025 - Architecting LARGE software projects - Eskil Steenberg

  API design

• Talk - 2021 - Correct by Construction: APIs That Are Easy to Use and Hard to Misuse - Matt Godbolt [ C++ on Sea ]

Programming

• Paper - 2007 - What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory
• Lecture - 2017 - How I program C - Eskil Steenberg

Datastores

Mixed

• Lecture - 2018 - Dr. Michael Stonebraker - 10 fears about the future of dbms field
• Paper - 2020 - Millions of Tiny Databases - usenix

Bigtable

• Paper - 2006 - Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data

DynamoDb

• Paper - 2007 - Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store
• Paper -2022 - Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service - Usenix

Postgres

• Talk - 2023 - A Detailed Understanding of MVCC and Autovacuum Internals in PostgreSQL 14 - Avinash Vallarapu

Redshift

• Paper - 2024 - Intelligent Scaling in Amazon Redshift

ScaleDB

• 2023 - ScaleDB: A Scalable, Asynchronous In-Memory Database - Usenix

Snowflake

• Automatic clustering at Snowflake

  • Covers the greatest greatest magic of snowflake (In my opinion)

• Paper - Small Materialized Aggregates: A Light Weight Index Structure for Data Warehousing - VLDB

Spanner

• Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database

Web3

• Talk - 2018 - Blockchains Are a Bad Idea (James Mickens)

ML, AI

• Article - 2020 - GPT3 and the scaling hypothesis - Gwern
• Article - 2019 - Complexity is not bar to AI - Gwern
• Article - 2022 - The Scaling Hypothesis

Security

• Talk - 2018 - Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible? - James Mickens - USENIX Security